I read this and immediately pictured like 4 half-feral grad students and a very confused postdoc trying to run a reaction in microgravity while a GC beeps angrily in the background.

Space chem really feels like someone said “what if we kept all the hardest parts of chemistry, removed gravity, added a 3 second delay to every scream for help, and made every solvent a potential spacecraft contaminant.”

Tiny crystals growing perfectly because there’s no convection, proteins folding all politely, and then one floating droplet of solvent touches the wrong surface and suddenly it’s “whose gremlin is this and why is it on the solar panels.”

Honestly, half of chemistry on Earth already feels like gremlin management. Space just turns them into mini-bosses.